This panel is mostly about how things look on the screen: windows, menus, buttons, scroll bars, and fonts. (It used to be called Appearance, but “General” is more like—yes, you guessed it—the iPhone and the iPad.) Nothing you find here lets you perform any radical surgery on the overall OS X look—but you can tweak certain settings to match your personal style.
Two pop-up menus let you crank up or tone down OS X’s overall colorfulness:
Appearance. Choose between Blue and Graphite. Blue refers to OS X’s factory setting—bright, candy-colored progress bars,
menu, and pulsing OK buttons—and those
shiny red, yellow, and green buttons in the corner of every
window. If you, like some graphics professionals, find all this
circus-poster coloring a bit distracting, then choose Graphite,
which renders all those interface elements in various shades of
gray.Highlight color. When you drag your cursor across text, its background changes color to indicate that you’ve selected it. Exactly what color the background becomes is up to you—just choose the shade you want using the pop-up menu. The Highlight color also affects such subtleties as the lines on the inside of a window as you drag an icon into it.
If you choose Other, the Color Picker palette appears, from which you can choose any color your Mac is capable of displaying.
This pop-up menu controls the size of the icons in the Sidebar as you’d expect. But you might not guess that it also controls the type size of those icons. And you’d definitely not guess that it simultaneously adjusts the size and type of the mailbox icons in the Mail program.
These options control the scroll bars of all your windows—including the controversial removal of scroll bars in Lion/Mountain Lion.
Show scroll bars. If you choose “Automatically based on mouse or trackpad,” then OS X makes the scroll bars appear or not based on what you have plugged in.
If you have a trackpad or a Magic Mouse, for example, Apple assumes that you’ll learn to scroll by dragging your fingers—so it figures you won’t be needing the scroll bars at the edges of the windows. Therefore, the scroll bars appear only when you’re actually scrolling (and then only to show you where you are in the window).
But if you have no way of using touch gestures—for example, if you have a regular mouse or Apple’s own Mighty Mouse—then scroll bars are always visible, so you don’t freak out.
“When scrolling” means that the scroll bars pop into view during the actual scroll, when your mouse or fingers-on-trackpad are actually in motion. And Always, of course, restores the pre-Lion scroll bar behavior; the scroll bars never disappear.
Click in the scroll bar to. For details on “Jump to the next page” and “Jump to the spot that’s clicked,” see the box on How the Scroll Bar Used to Work.
This option is for people who liked the old “Save changes before closing?” message that appears when you close a document—instead of the Auto Save feature (Auto Save and Versions). If you turn this item on, Auto Save will still be there in case your program crashes, for example. But when you close that document or its program, you’ll be asked whether or not you want to preserve the changes you’ve made since your last manual Save. Auto Save programs like Pages and TextEdit, in other words, will work just like they used to—and the way all other programs do.
Here it is: the master on/off switch for the Mountain Lion feature responsible for reopening your last-used documents and windows each time you open a window.
Usually, the auto-reopening feature saves you time and helps you resume your mental flow—but if you find it disturbing (or if you’re worried about someone else discovering what you’re up to), turn on this checkbox.
Just how many of your recently opened documents and
applications do you want the Mac to show using the Recent Items command in the menu? Pick a number from the pop-up menus.
For example, you might choose 30 for documents, 20 for programs, and
5 for servers.
The Mac’s built-in text-smoothing (antialiasing) feature is supposed to produce smoother, more commercial-looking text anywhere it appears on your Mac: in word processing documents, email messages, Web pages, and so on.
Experiment with the on/off checkbox to see how you like the effect. Either way, it’s fairly subtle (see Figure 15-12). Furthermore, unlike most System Preferences, this one has no effect until the next time you open the program in question. In the Finder, for example, you won’t notice the difference until you log out and log back in again.
At smaller type sizes (10-point and smaller), you might find that text is actually less readable with font smoothing turned on. It all depends upon the font, the size, your monitor, and your taste. For that reason, this pop-up menu lets you choose a cutoff point. If you choose 12 here, for example, then 12-point (and smaller) type still appears crisp and sharp; only larger type, such as in headlines, displays the graceful edge smoothing. You can choose a size cutoff as low as 4-point.
(None of these settings affect your printouts, only the onscreen display.)